Deal with army worm menace

Ghana is among sub-Saharan African countries struggling to battle the army worm invasion.

Already, hundreds of hectares of farms have come under the attack of the virulent pests and as the damage continues, farmers are wondering what the future holds for them.

Indeed, the Peasant Farmers Association has not hidden its displeasure at the development and warned that its members risk losing their livelihoods if the pests are not brought under control.

Apart from stripping farmers of their livelihoods, the devastating army worms also pose a threat to national food security.

For a country that still spends millions of dollars to import food to supplement what is produced locally, this cannot be a story favourable to the ear.

And happening at a time when the government has set in motion its flagship agricultural programme, Planting for Food and Jobs, it sends strong signals out there that unless the authorities sit up, the objective of using the programme to increase food productivity, ensure food security for the country, as well as reduce the food import bill to the barest minimum, will be a mirage, at least in the foreseeable future.

The fact that the army worm invasion is a potentially disastrous development that should be handled with all seriousness has not escaped the lenses of the government.

That is why, in a memo to the Cabinet, the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, is seeking parliamentary approval to allow unbudgeted funds to be used to undertake a mass spraying exercise to stop the spread of the pests.

Although some amount of work has been done in the fight against the pests, it appears all is not well, as farmers continue to complain about the destruction of their crops, mostly maize.

Some African countries have taken bold measures to halt the invading pests and things are working for them.

Zambia, for instance, is reported to have deployed military aircraft to spray over 100,000 hectares of affected farms with pesticides and has thus succeeded in containing the pests.

We may not be in the situation to go the Zambian way, but we need to sit up and say that once the outbreak has happened, we need to mobilise all the available resources to combat the pests.

Going into the future, the Daily Graphic wants our agricultural experts and research institutions to develop a workable pest management system which has in it an early warning system to help both policy makers and farmers combat any such invasion.

We are encouraged by the assurance by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture that about 80 per cent of maize farms have been protected against the invasion and that there is no cause for alarm, as planting in the northern sector just got underway.

Agriculture is considered the backbone of the Ghanaian economy and even as we make efforts to turn the economy into an industrialised one, we cannot go on with industrialisation at the expense of agriculture.

The Daily Graphic, therefore, calls on the government to mobilise all the resources to combat the army worms.